“Digital technologies have made transformation affordable to any firm of any size across the world. Our imagination is the only limit.”
– Sukumar R, CEO at TinyMagiq
Fifty percent of the companies in the S&P 500 will fail in the next 10 years. New technologies are allowing teams around the globe to be competitive in radically new ways. New types of businesses are popping up every day across industries and disrupting the status quo.
These companies are rethinking and redesigning every aspect of traditional businesses. Using Design Thinking and new technologies, they are able to deliver more value (better pricing, higher quality and faster service), better User Experiences and more streamlined customer journeys.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…”
The only way to become more resilient and survive this disruption in the long run is to develop a habit for experimentation. Humans are extremely adaptable however, organisations are not often designed to encourage risk taking, personal initiative or experimentation. Every organisation, big or small, old or new struggles with change.
How to build a culture of experimentation?
The key to digital transformation is to build an environment for your team that enables and encourages experimentation and rapid learning. Depending on your industry and role, it may not always be easy to get started.
Here is a definition of a simple environment that you need to have in place prior to any form of organizational change (provided you are going to be driving that change incrementally). These are some of the processes and steps that we, at Massive Rocket, take our customers through over the course of the projects that we work on:
1. Start small
Starting transformation is a ton of hard work. You need to constantly bring new skills to your team so they remain competitive. Big companies, even the more conservative ones, have to evolve to compete with startups. They can either change or disappear like the dinosaurs did. The good news is that the tech giants have proven that you can be huge yet flexible. They have achieved this by building a swarm of small teams aligned around the same goal.
Dmitriy Krivitskiy, Managing Director at VTB Bank
The ideal scenario for change is to start with small wins, proving out the value of your approach and then scaling the process. Start with a small but high value problem and have a clear agreement on how you will measure the success of your experiment.
2. Get closer to your customers
We have found that the answer to product market fit and true differentiation is almost always found within your existing or target customer base. Every step you take that gets you and your team closer to your customers is a leap forward in terms of market differentiation and competitive advantage. The best companies know their customers intimately, anticipate their needs and serve them in a personalised and relevant way.
3. Measure Everything
When building products, it is easy to lose track of why you are building something. How do you know if what you are building is helping your business grow? Product owners have a ton of different stakeholders which very often makes their job impossible: 1) The business 2) The team 3) Users 4) Sales 5) Marketing….. You can’t make everyone happy all the time. Without a clear strategy, process and tools to measure your progress in real-time, you will very easily end up in endless debates and arguments over what to do next.
4. Find your North Star
Get your teams aligned behind a single overarching goal and make sure that goal is measurable and tied to your business growth. Using the north star framework to drive your product strategy is an essential investment to running an impact-driven organization. It is a path towards becoming a product-led company.
5. Celebrate Successes and Failures
The best way of becoming more resilient as a company is getting into a habit of transparency, sharing and learning. Don’t forget to regularly involve the rest of the organisation in what you are doing. Share and promote your progress internally regularly, ask for help from different departments and start growing the collaboration spirit.
Get in touch if you would like to see a practical approach on how to apply these 5 steps:
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